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Cambodia Travel

Cambodia, Cambodia beaches, Cambodia tours, Cambodia travel, Cambodia people.

- Cambodia travel opens the view for Angkor, Phnom Pen and more .

Today just take a Cambodia flight maybe by Air Asia out of Bangkok Airport or Kuala Lumpur Airport or by Tiger Airways from Changi Airport in Singapore and have fun at Cambodia vacation. There are also other airlines such as Silk Air and Bangkok Airways but just forget them they are relatively very expensive . Example Air Asia charges for the Bangkok Phnom Penh flight Baht 1500,- Bangkok Airways pulls Baht 4500,- etc. got the message ? The Siem Reap flight means travel to Angkor.

A typical route (90% of the visitors are tourists) could be usually from Singapore Airport or Bangkok Suvarnabhumi, do some advance booking for a Cambodia Hotel via the internet.

Don't care about currency exchange because everyone will charge you in

dollars anyway, the only time you come in contact with the Cambodian currency, the Riel, is when the people needs to give you some small cash back and they don't have this in dollars. Currently (2011) the dollars is equivalent to around 4 Riel. During your stay at Phnom Penh take a Mekong river cruise to explore the Mekong River, the Tonle Sap River and the Bassac River which all come together at Siem Reap.

The ancient temple of Angkor Wat are just part of visiting temples. There is Phnom Penh with the Royal Palace, Cambodia temples and a great riverfront along the Tonle Sap, called Sisowath Quay. There is a great nightlife at Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, actually there are daily ferries on the Tonle Sap connecting Phnom Penh Siem Reap by a speed boat, travel time is 5 hours, starting at Sisowath Quay at 7.30am, the bus is much cheaper an wont take much longer. At this Cambodian trip you will pass floating villages and see life on the river which gives a good idea what’s going on.

angkor wat
Angkor Wat
Cambodia travel
Cambodia travel
Cambodia travel Tonle Sap River Cruise
Cambodia travel Tonle Sap River Cruise

Travel Angkor Wat is a flight to Siem Reap from Bangkok or travel from Bangkok to Angkor by bus. Find a Angkor hotel or rather Siem Reap Hotel or other accommodation in the internet.

To book Cambodia tours the internet is the best place, for flights just book directly at the Tiger Airways website or Air Asia website, to do this within the country is no problem every hotel and most "better" restaurants have free internet access.

Cambodia travel is finally more or less a 3 part story, first are the monuments such as Angkor Wat and others, second are some beach vacation at Sihanoukville and the islands around.

The next is the countryside such as the Bokor National Park, the rivers and a still intact nature in the east along the border with Vietnam.

When doing Cambodia travel it is easy to see that there are plenty of links between the country and Vietnam, also there are plenty of bus connections between Phnom Penh and Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City plus a daily connection by speedboat.

- The Kingdom has around fifteen million inhabitants

and most are women because of the lunatic behavior of the so called “Khmer Rouge” how where inspired by France and China to an idiotic behavior.

Phnom Penh Siem Reap
Phnom Penh Siem Reap travel
Cambodia tours, Cambodia travel
Cambodia travel
Cambodia travel
Cambodia travel
Air Asia over Phnom Penh
Cambodia tours Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh Airport
Cambodia tours Phnom Penh Airport
Flight to Phnom Penh
Cambodia tours

It is necessary to know that all of the inner circle of the Khmer Rouge have been studying in France where they got their lunatic ideas and were supported afterwards by the “Red Chinese” to implement this lunatic behavior.

Have a look at the Royal Palace Phnom Penh and Cambodian temples they are not only at Angkor. The country is very interesting so you can be sure your vacation will be a pleasant one. Another very interesting feature is that there plenty of people speaking English very well, actually much more people speak excellent English compared to Thailand at the tourist spots such as Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. The school system is not so bad, naturally in the countryside its different but there are strong efforts to improve this.

- Buddhism in Cambodia
Royal Palace Phnom Penh
Royal Palace Phnom Penh
 

The national religion is Theravada Buddhism which is also practiced in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. The monastic life here plays the principal role and the popular faith, while rudimentary and sometimes tinted with remains of ancient superstition, is based on the transmigration of the soul and the search for personal salvation through work during the course of an existence in which each action is accounted for in the regulation of the future. After death the body is carried to cremation and it ends with either the deposit of the ashes in a small funerary monument (Cedei) or their scattering on sacred ground.

There are some Christian sects trying to manipulate their firm believe in Buddha via all kind of manipulations, presents etc.. Finally the people will loose their identities, all this happen for the sake of gods which only is existent in the head of the missionaries.

Just the same way as they did with the Indio in south America when they slashed the mental roots of the indigenous people who finally had a total collapse of their culture and ended up in misery.  Khmer Style Buddha at Phnom Penh National Museum
Khmer Buddha Phnom Penh Museum

Buddhism at Angkor
Buddhism at Angkor
Buddhism
Buddhism

- Cambodia People

Women at central market
Market Women
wedding
Wedding
cycling
Cambodia People

The population consists mostly of Cambodia women, because of the lunatic "Khmer Rough" who mainly killed the men. Means this great country is full of pretty Asian women. There are over 2 million people living in households run by a women alone. They often have to take the responsibilities for the farm and the household. They are also managing livestock and the fisheries as well. These abilities are quite attractive to many other people

childs in poverty
Childs in poverty
beach vendor
Beach vendor girl pineapple
especially farmers in search of a good wife. The main problem for Cambodian people is almost all of them in the country side are stuck ib poverty. On the other side Phnom Penh Cambodia has the highest density of luxury SUV's in the world. There is a steep difference from the people who have something and the others who have nothing. farmer at work
C
ountryside
kids
Child Poverty


As it is visible at the pictures here poverty in Cambodia is widespread, actually its the normality and there is some help from various UN agencies and NGO's to help. But there is 

Cambodia People women at market
Cambodia People women at market

Cambodia People Countryside Living

no much real help, this international organizations mainly try to play politics and their many of their employees mainly from the UN using their 4 digit $ monthly salary to have a good life including luxury SUV's etc. Since this UN and NGO people are living from the donations of western taxpayers for the country this is somehow parasitic since if they scale down their SUV and other living they could spent much more money for the Cambodian people in need.

Bus from Phnom Penh Siem Reap
Bus from Phnom Penh Siem Reap

Want to know more about the country? use the bus from Phnom Penh Siem Reap instead of the aircraft or the speed boat.

The bus journey costs about $ 7,-, takes 5 hours and the result is to know a bit of the countryside. The buses are quite comfortable and easy match a business class seat in an aircraft but TV is above the driver.

Bus from Phnom Penh Siem Reap Passenger
Bus from Phnom Penh Siem Reap Passenger

The countryside looks quite poor but Cambodian people improve living conditions and knowledge quite quick that includes active nationwide support of English language which is quite different to Thailand where almost no one speak good English since the rulers do nothing to improve the English capability.

Wedding Party
Wedding Party
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Houses
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Houses,
the houses are mostly on stilts to
prevent the floods to come in during monsoon times and the stairs up
can also function as a barrier to unwanted people. Windows are often
without glass and many houses are just made from palm leaves.
Phnom Penh Siem Reap
Phnom Penh Siem Reap
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Tonle Sap
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Tonle Sap
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Transportation
Phnom Penh Siem Reap Transportation
If one is to believe the legend, the ancient dynasties of the Khmer empire

were derived from the union of a Hindu prince, Preah Thong - who had been banished from Delhi by his father - with a “female serpent-woman”, the daughter of the Nagaraja, who was sovereign of the land. She appeared to him in radiant beauty, frolicking on a sand bank where he had come to make camp for the night. He took her as his wife, and the Nagaraja, draining the land by drinking the water that covered it, gave him the new country, called it Kambuja and built him a capital. A variation, revealed on an inscription at Mison in Champa (mid Vietnam) and reproduced in various descriptions of Cambodia, substitutes for the prince the Brahman Kaundinya, who “married the nagi Soma to accomplish the rites” and, throwing the magic lance with which he was armed, founded at the point of its landing the royal city where Somavamsa, the race of the moon, would rule.

Another popular tradition, though less widespread, gives as the origin the coupling of the maharashi Kambu and the apsara Mera, whose union is symbolic of that between the two great races, solar


Contemporary Khmer Buddha

(Suryavamsa) and lunar (Somavamsa). This survives particularly in the word Kambuja - son of Kambu - from where derives the name “Cambodian” by which we now call the present descendants of the ancient Khmer. Whichever version one takes, the mythical implication is undeniable and the truth remains - that the Khmer people are born of a joining of two distinct elements; Indian and Khmer. They are not, as some would believe, just people of purely Indian or Hindu origin who had come, following migration, to settle in a region devoid of any inhabitants, or where the indigenous race had been eliminated by mass deportation.

Several south east Asian countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand got their alphabets, religion and plenty of cultural elements from India over hundreds of years. This is somehow strange since the peoples of the mentioned countries migrated definitely from China and not from India but it looks as if this cultural parameter where carried in by the spreading of Buddhism.

Ancient Khmer
Ancient Khmer

 - Angkor was established more than thousand years ago

  Angkor Wat main gate
Angkor Wat main gate
Angkor Wat
Angkor Wat
Angkor Wat  Apsara Dancer
Angkor Wat Apsara Dancer
Angkor Wat Hindu God
Angkor Wat Hindu God
Angkor Wat inside
Angkor Wat inside

ruling an area which including present day Cambodia, Cochin China and parts of Siam and Laos, they were in fact a mixture - from an ethnological rather than a linguistic point of view - of people from lower Burma and  various barbarous people from the animistic chain, themselves in turn quite probably deriving from Negroid and Indonesian roots.

The Indian contribution apparently resulted from a natural expansion towards the east for commercial, civil and religious reasons rather than for any brutal political motivation. Moreover, with the fall of the Khmer empire - came a total decline and abandonment of the capital, but, mysteriously, not the entire extinction of the race. With a little help from France and a clear understanding of the glory of their past.

Siam
Siam
At Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom
Angkor Thom
at Angkor Cambodia
at Angkor

Cambodia at Angkor and elsewhere experienced the up and downs in history, practically every country went through this disaster time, many not only once.

Characteristics and traditions, religion can’t be taken off. Even catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquake, flood or whatever are only a “intermezzo” with creative people like the Khmer are without doubt things get to normal after a while, even when this is a long while.

The main problem at the time probably was that catastrophes bring epidemics and this was difficult to handle, means many people probably died.
Heads at Angkor Thom

Road to Angkor Thom
Road to Angkor Thom
Around Angkor Cambodia
Around Angkor
Part of Angkor Cambodia Irrigation System
Part of Angkor Irrigation System
Ta Phrom Temple
Ta Prohm Temple - muscular embrace of vast tree-root systems, photo by W. Poerner

- Temple raider.

The Khmer Buddha's are by now on their way to the antique shops of Bangkok, or the auction houses of the West. They are bound ultimately for secret collections of Angkorian art in an illicit and thriving trade that is consigning one of the wonders of the world to a slow death.


The temples of Angkor were built between the 9th and 14th centuries, when Khmer civilization was at its height and the empire stretched north to Yunnan in China and from Vietnam westwards to the Bay of Bengal. Unparalleled in south-east Asia, they are a living testament to the extraordinary creativity of the Khmer. Similar archeological sites are at Myanmar Bagan, at Sukhothai and Ayutthaya in Thailand and
Borobudur in Indonesia.

Today Angkor antiquities

can be seen at Bangkok's River City complex, Singapore's Tanglin shopping center and around London's auction houses is necessary to mention that it is not possible to get smuggled items into Singapore and even in the shops there without the

government just close the eyes to this unlawful practice. The Singaporean government fine you when you have a chewing gum or wont flush the toilet at a public toilet, but they don't care when a neighboring country is looted and the bounty is sold in the Singapore shopping mall, who makes the money?

There are even persistent rumors of the existence of a catalogue containing detailed photographs of Angkor Cambodia statues and bas-reliefs, allowing wealthy Westerners to order specific items still in-situ. And three countries in the world still allow antiquities to be purchased without documentation: Australia, Japan and Switzerland. On the black market, a life-sized Buddha from Angkor, can fetch at least $250,000 and this the reason why the looting continues.

The exorbitant prices that Khmer art fetches on the international market. "The country remains very poor. The army is very poor," and when everyone is extremely poor its rather normal to try to get some money in the pocket, that's human nature.

But the overwhelming sentiment is one of sadness at the irreparable damage by tomb raider and other Cambodians have been driven by poverty and the greed of foreigners to inflict on their own heritage.

Khmer Art
Khmer Art
 

Girl Cycling
Cycling

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